During the day, maestros taught the less experienced in the art of the Argentinian dance. In the early evening, champagne bottles would pop-open to celebrate the mixed show of a Buenos Aires band and the singers and dancers that made the audience travel in time and space, across the Atlantic and beyond the equator, to 1930’s smoke-filled clubs of the city on the silver river.

Then, come midnight, all the tables would be removed. The gigantic clubhouse turned into a dancing hall for the all-night milonga that would last until the sunrise. Couples paired for the first dance and they rarely kept together, much like a fast-dating event. Partners experimented each other’s embrace, and looked for a match that would dance them the night away.

As for us, sketchers, we sketched. Not as long as the dancers danced though, for the week had been long for all of us. Myself having the only reference in a single panel of Hugo Pratt’s graphic novel Tango, I tried to follow the master’s lead, as well as the maestros steps both onstage and in the dance hall.

Carlos – sketcher and tango-enthusiast – invited a few of us – Mónia, Luís and I – to attend the International Lisbon Tango Festival as live sketchers. To get the most tango neophytes possible, the Festival organized tango workshops on the week before, having instructors teach the very first steps of the Argentinian dance to participants. For us sketchers, these were welcome warm up sessions. In the bucolic scenery of the Palácio Pimenta, where the Museu da Cidade is housed, beginners clumsily and shyly shed their fears to the dancing floor, as the instructors told them about the significance and uniqueness of the embrace in tango.

Clumsily and shyly also describes how our sketching started. The scenery was overwhelming with detail, but the dancing should be the focus, so I struggled back and forth in detailing the natural back- and foreground. To describe the action and characters, I opted for silhouettes as it would help me explore the lighting of the scene, create the illusion of motion and also strip the dancers bare of casual clothing and visual characterization. This also allowed me to focus on body language and relationship in the dancing pairs – which is, after all, the main focus of tango.

These first three watercolors are exhibited in the antechamber of the main hall of Voz do Operário, together with Mónia’s, Carlos’ and Luís’ ones. During the Festival, more of them will join the showcase as we spend our next few evenings in the sweaty milongas of the dancing hall.

It’s been a month now since Marina Grechanik’s workshop in Lisboa and it’s still kicking in. I’ve been experimenting a lot with ecolines, waterwashes as sketching base, big contrasts and form simplification. There’s actually not much story about these two spreads. Just a bunch of people I don’t know from the subway, the tram and the street.

And a bunch of people I do know, in a bar. In a mixture of techniques very unlike me. Oh, and a couple dancing lindy hop. Or jitterbug. I keep forgetting which.

Taking advantage of this very intimate hours of these youngsters feels very weird at first – like an invasion of a private moment and space. But soon after the concentration levels are high, everyone just minds their own business and focus on what they love best – the students, the sketchers, the dance teacher, even the pianist who’s setting the tune for the whole act.

It’s an extraordinary weekly opportunity for sketchers to grasp the shape and movement of bodies in their finest moment. Although it is very challenging at first, the exercise pays off in the end. It’s also an excellent visual memory stimulant, to save in the mind’s eye a single pose, or a single movement in the myriad of elegant steps and twirls these students undertake for the three hours of the duration of the class.